Managing e: Book Metadata in Academic Libraries. Taming the Tiger

283 Pages·2015·5.34 MB·English

by  Frederick

Managing eBook Metadata in Academic
Libraries
Chandos
Information Professional Series
Series Editor: Ruth Rikowski
(email: [email protected])
Chandos’ new series of books is aimed at the busy information professional. They have been
specially commissioned to provide the reader with an authoritative view of current thinking.
They are designed to provide easy-to-read and (most importantly) practical coverage of topics
that are of interest to librarians and other information professionals. If you would like a full
listing of current and forthcoming titles, please visit www.chandospublishing.com.
New authors: we are always pleased to receive ideas for new titles; if you would like to write
a book for Chandos, please contact Dr Glyn Jones on [email protected] or telephone +44
(0) 1865 843000.
Managing eBook
Metadata in Academic
Libraries
Taming the Tiger
Donna E. Frederick
AMSTERDAM(cid:127)BOSTON(cid:127)CAMBRIDGE (cid:127)HEIDELBERG
LONDON(cid:127)NEWYORK(cid:127)OXFORD(cid:127)PARIS(cid:127)SANDIEGO
SANFRANCISCO(cid:127)SINGAPORE(cid:127)SYDNEY(cid:127)TOKYO
Chandos Publishing is an imprint of Elsevier
Chandos Publishing is an imprint of Elsevier
225 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA 02451, USA
Langford Lane, Kidlington, OX5 1GB, UK
Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage
and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Details on how to
seek permission, further information about the Publisher’s permissions policies and our
arrangements with organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Center and the Copyright
Licensing Agency, can be found at our website: www.elsevier.com/permissions.
This book and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by the
Publisher (other than as may be noted herein).
Notices
Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and
experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or
medical treatment may become necessary.
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in
evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein.
In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the
safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.
To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors,
assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of
products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods,
products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.
ISBN: 978-0-08-100151-6
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015942334
For information on all Chandos Publishing
visit our website at http://store.elsevier.com/
Dedication
This book is dedicated to
My parents, Ted and Eileen Mazurek, who taught me the
value of quiet toil and perseverance.
My professional mentor, Jill Crawley-Low, without whose
help and example I likely would never have found a place
in academic librarianship.
My husband, John Frederick, whose love, support, patience, and
proofreading were essential to the completion of this book.
List of Figures and Tables
Figure 3.1 This is a sample of the type of metadata flows document the author uses
at her library. The starburst represent discovery services or interfaces
external to the ILS, which use the library’s MARC records; the rectangles
represent processes within the ILS, which add new MARC metadata
to the bibliographic database; the circles represent vendor-provided
metadata, which is fed directly into the ILS; and the cylinders
represent metadata, which is crosswalked from other collections
or repositories. The arrows represent the direction or directions in
which metadata flows 37
Figure 4.1 Example of a “good” spreadsheet 78
Springer is an example of an eBook publisher which offers a
customizable MARC record-set generator for use by their customers 148
This diagram shows the process through which eBook vendors can
use OCLC’s WorldShare Metadata Collection Manager to deliver
eBook records and update records to their customers 154
MARCEdit editing and metadata processing applications, available
for download from http://marcedit.reeset.net/downloads 181
View of Tools in the MARCEdit record set editing application.
MARCEdit editing and metadata processing applications can be
accessed through this MARCEdit window. MARCEdit is available
for download from http://marcedit.reeset.net/downloads 183
MARCEdit tools can be accessed via the Tools menu in the editor
or from the menus on the MARCEdit window 184
“Functions available on the MARCEdit Add-ins menu” 190
Figure 9.1 University of California, Davis metadata flows diagram example 256
Table 4.1 This is an example of a simple table which could be used to track
eBook problems which aren’t resolved in a timely fashion using
readily available metadata 67
Table 8.1 Digital monograph metadata management inventory 230
About the author
Donna Frederick is the Metadata Librarian at the University of Saskatchewan. She
has worked in various school, public, special, and academic libraries since the 1980s.
The positions she has held range from circulation and children’s services to outreach,
reference, instruction, management, and technical services. As an academic librar-
ian, Donna’s area of interest is the study of the impact of disruptive technologies on
academic libraries. For the past 5 years, she has been working intensively with the
eBook collection at the University of Saskatchewan. She has been building her ex-
pertise in eBook cataloguing, electronic resource troubleshooting, and platform func-
tionality since 2010 and currently leads the Cataloging Group at the University of
Saskatchewan.
Introduction
For over a decade news reports, opinion pieces, social media discussions, and coffee
room chitchat have revealed a diversity of opinion about eBooks among librarians,
academics, students, and readers of all ages. Those opinions range from the extreme
point of view that suggests eBooks will gradually make libraries irrelevant, to those
who see eBooks as providing an inferior reading experience relative to the one pro-
vided by the reality of feeling the firmness of a well-bound book in hand and the smell
of freshly printed pages. For years the various eBook debates remained a curiosity to
the author. It seemed that while there was a certain degree of utility and novelty associ-
ated with reading an eBook, the author failed to relate to any of the seemingly extreme
sentiments either for or against eBooks.
Upon reflection, a certain amount of ambivalence about eBooks on the part of
the author should have been expected given her previous library experience. Her first
library job was in a public library in 1984 and involved the checking and cleaning
of vinyl records and repairing the sprockets on 16-mm films. Ever since records and
16-mm films became largely obsolete for public library collections and the resources
were disposed of in one way or another, the author has been keenly aware of the im-
pact that technological change can have on library collections and the types of work
done by library employees. She has long accepted that new technologies will come
along and some will stay and some will go. In addition, as technologies come and
go the tasks that need to be done change and library workers develop new skills in
response. In the author’s 30 years of working in libraries there have basically been
two constants: change and print books. EBooks, while clearly a change, simply didn’t
seem to represent anything all that remarkable relative to all of the other new formats
and technologies introduced in libraries over the years.
This ambivalence toward eBooks was quickly overturned when the author became
a full-time student in an online education library and information science program in
2009. It soon became apparent that the availability of eJournals, eBooks, and other
electronic resources were key factors that made it possible to have a good quality
learning experience despite being located more than 500 km from the nearest library
school. Not only could a student have access to thousands of eBook titles through the
screen of a laptop, those eBooks allowed many options that weren’t available when us-
ing print books. These options included the ability to do keyword searching, automat-
ically saving citations to a citation manager, linking directly from the eBook to other
resources or documents, and copying and pasting small amounts of text for quoting
in papers and projects. The author soon came to love the convenience, flexibility, and
functionality of the eBooks she used for her classes and for her research. It became
evident how some eBook users may have come to the conclusion that print books and
traditional libraries could become irrelevant. That being said, two-and-a-half decades
xvi Introduction
of experience in libraries helped to bring that notion into context. The reality is that
library collections are large and diverse. EBooks, while very important to many users,
are a part of that diversity. Upon further reflection, it seemed that to suggest eBooks
could or would replace the entirety of the hard copy collections of libraries was a
somewhat naïve thought. As a student, the author continued to appreciate the avail-
ability of eBooks without getting caught up in the debate about them being a threat to
traditional library collections. The reality is she didn’t think too much about the other
part of the equation: new technology changes the tasks that need to be done in libraries
and the skills that library workers need to have.
Upon the completion of her most recent degree, the author set out make the tran-
sition from public services in public libraries to technical services in academic and
research libraries. Almost as soon as the author stepped through the doors of an aca-
demic library as a librarian with a new skill set, it seemed that numerous challenges
with regard to eBooks were presented to her to solve. Those challenges ranged from
researching eBook deselection policies to finding a simplified way to track eBook pur-
chases. When she accepted a position as a metadata librarian in 2011, the first duty she
was given was to begin to tackle a multiyear backlog of eBook MARC record sets and
to assist with troubleshooting a number of problems with existing catalog records for
eBooks. It didn’t take long to realize that while her years of experience and recently
updated training provided an excellent starting point for working with eBooks, new
knowledge and skills would need to be developed to work effectively with eBooks.
During the first few months of working with eBook metadata the author seemed to
be making great strides and plowing through backlogs of record sets at what seemed
to be breakneck speed. Eventually, it became apparent that there was much more to
dealing with eBooks and managing their metadata than was first apparent. Various
complexities, inconsistencies, complications, and outright nuisances began to raise
their heads. It soon became clear that what the author originally saw as an effective
and efficient method for “clearing out the backlog” resulted in a somewhat indiscrimi-
nate “dumping” of records into the local catalog. In the process of trying to rectify the
resulting problems, it became increasingly apparent that the information required to
make better decisions and design better processes was either not recorded locally or
was not recorded in a way that was useful to the author.
To learn more about what other academic libraries do to manage their eBook col-
lections and record sets, the author set out to locate and read as many journal articles as
possible; attend webinars offered by vendors and professional organizations; and speak
to other academic librarians in person and online. In the journal articles and webinars, the
author found a few useful tips but also discovered that much of the information was either
out-of-date or was specific to situations and products that weren’t relevant to her academic
library. Questions about eBooks and managing the metadata for them that were posed
at conferences were often met with eye rolling, sighs, clenched fists, and tirades about
problems with specific eBook vendors. It was clear that the author was not alone in many
of her frustrations with eBooks. In addition, these conversations revealed a few helpful
tips and, as with the journal articles and webinars, information and solutions that simply
weren’t relevant to the author’s library. Within 6 months of beginning her new journey
working with eBooks, the author began to accept that of all of the technological changes
Introduction xvii
she had to deal with over the years, eBooks were proving to be the most challenging
of all of them. This realization was significant considering that in her first library job
that library had not yet adopted a fully automated system for circulation, and discovery was
done via microfiche cards and a cart catalog. In those days, the library had a machine that
took a picture of a patron’s library card, a picture of a card from the item, and a picture of
a card that had the due date stamped on it and the resulting photographs were used to
circulate materials. Even transitioning from that system to a computerized one was not
as confusing and disconcerting as was the first year of dealing with eBooks.
After 4 years of talking and listening, learning and experimenting, and making an
effort to adjust to changes as they were presented, the author has come a long way in
terms of learning how to deal with eBooks at her library and manage the associated
metadata. She has a much clearer vision of what needs to be done and why it should
be done. That being said, there is still a lot of work to be done. Because of the sheer
volume of eBooks that have been added to the collection in a relatively short period of
time, the complexity of the systems in which the eBooks and their metadata are used,
and the interdependency of the library functions required to make everything work to-
gether well, it is often difficult to coordinate and achieve many of the goals and desired
outcomes. Essentially the presence of eBooks in academic libraries push up against
the walls of functional silos, which can exist in any library and generally haven’t been
an issue when dealing with print collections. In the end, eBooks appear to be a force
that, like many other technological changes the author has seen in the past, is driving
library staff to change the work that they do and how they do it. Hopefully, this book
will provide insight into why and how changes need to occur.
One lesson learned by the author in the past 4 years or so is that when it comes to
eBooks and managing eBook metadata in academic libraries, there is a lot of com-
plexity, which means that a one-size-fits-all solution is highly unlikely to be effective.
That is, it’s not likely to be effective given the diversity of products, systems, and
patrons demands that are frequently found in today’s academic library environment.
Therefore, the approach of this book has not been to attempt to be prescriptive but to
help readers to explore the metadata and eBook environment at their own library and
create their own eBook metadata management plan. Principles, practices, standards,
and guidelines will be discussed along the way to help shape and guide the work of
the reader, but ultimately the resulting metadata plans will reflect the unique environ-
ment and needs of the reader’s library. While this book has been written with newer
librarians and those librarians who have recently been reassigned to technical services
positions in mind, hopefully the content will be useful to all librarians, senior library
technicians, managers and those who work with eBooks, and the various types of
metadata associated with them. The book contains many references to tools, training
resources, standards, and guidelines that readers can use to both extend and customize
their learning experience.
It is hoped that all readers will come away from reading this book with a deeper un-
derstanding of the nature of eBook metadata, solid principles that can be used to guide
decisions and survive changes, and the beginnings of an eBook metadata management
plan. Questions, comments, observations, and other communication about this book
can be directed to the author at the e-mail address [email protected].